WP-Engine 502 timeout- what options do I have to get around this limitation?

We have a plugin for Wordpress that we've been using successfully on many customers- the plugin syncs stock numbers with our warehouse and exports orders to our warehouse.

We have recently had a client move to WP-Engine who seem to impose a hard 30 second limit on the length of a running request. Because sometimes we have many orders to export, the script simply hits a 502 bad gateway error.

According to WP-Engine documentation, this cannot be turned off on a client by client basis.

My question is, what options do I have to get around a host's 30 second timeout limit? Setting set_time_limit has no effect. The only thing I can think of is make heavy modifications to the plugin whereby it acts as an API and we simply pull the data from the clients store.

via Chebli Mohamed